Design by Contract, proposed by Meyer for the programming language Eiffel, is a technique that allows run-time checks of specification violation and their treatment during program execution. Jass, Java with assertions, is a Design by Contract extension for Java allowing to annotate Java programs with specifications in the form of assertions. The Jass tool is a pre-compiler that translates annotated into pure Java programs in which compliance with the specification is dynamically tested. Besides the

Abstract not found

This paper formulates representation independence for classes, in an imperative, object-oriented language with pointers, subclassing and dynamic dispatch, class oriented visibility control, recursive types and methods, and a simple form of module. An instance of a class is considered to implement an abstraction using private fields and so-called representation objects. Encapsulation of representation objects is expressed by a restriction, called confinement, on aliasing. Representation independence is proved for programs satisfying the confinement condition. A static analysis is given for confinement that accepts common designs such as the observer and factory patterns. The formalization takes into account not only the usual interface between a client and a class that provides an abstraction but also the interface (often called "protected") between the class and its subclasses

This paper presents experiments on formal validation of Java applets. It describes a tool that has been developed at the Gemplus Research Labs. This tool allows to formally prove Java classes annotated with JML, an annotation language for Java that provides a framework for specifying class invariants and methods behaviours. The foundations and the main features of the tool are presented. The most innovative part of the tool is that it is tailored to be used by Java programmers, without any particular background in formal methods. To reduce the di#culty of using formal techniques, it aims to provide a user-friendly interface which hides to developers most of the formal features and provides a "Java style view" of lemmas.

This paper presents a historical overview of the work on Java program verification at the University of Nijmegen (the Netherlands) over the past six years (1997--2003). It describes the development and use of the LOOP tool that is central in this work. Also, it gives a perspective on the field.

The state of knowledge in how to specify sequential programs in object-oriented languages such as Java and C# and the state of the art in automated verification tools for such programs have made measurable progress in the last several years. This paper describes several remaining challenges and approaches to their solution.

Source-code verification works by reasoning about the semantics of the full source code of a program. Traditionally it is limited to small programs written in an academic programming language. In this paper we present the VFiasco (Verified Fiasco) project, in which we apply source-code verification to a complete operating-system kernel written in C++. The aim of the VFiasco project is to establish security relevant properties of the Fiasco microkernel using source code verification. The project's main challenges are to develop a clean semantics for the subset of C++ used by the kernel and to enable high-level reasoning about typed data starting from only low-level knowledge about the hardware. In this paper we present our ideas for tackling these challenges. We sketch a semantics of C++ and develop a type-safe object store for reasoning about C++ programs. This object store is based on a hardware model that closely resembles the IA32 virtual-memory architecture, and on guarantees provided by the kernel itself.

This article presents a mathematical characterization of object-oriented concepts by defining an observation-oriented semantics for a relational objectoriented language with a rich variety of features including subtypes, visibility, inheritance, type casting, dynamic binding and polymorphism. The language is expressive enough for the specification of object-oriented designs and programs. We also propose a calculus based on this model to support both structural and behavioral refinement of object-oriented designs. We take the approach of the development of the design calculus based on the standard predicate logic in Hoare and He’s Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP). We also consider object reference in terms of object identity as values and mutually dependent methods.

Abstract. This paper outlines a sound and complete Hoare logic for a sequential object-oriented language with inheritance and subtyping like Java. It describes a weakest precondition calculus for assignments and object-creation, as well as Hoare rules for reasoning about (mutually recursive) method invocations with dynamic binding. Our approach enables reasoning at an abstraction level that coincides with the general abstraction level of object-oriented languages. 1

Abstract not found